OKPOLICY.ORG
Steve Lewis served as Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1989-1991. He currently practices law in Tulsa and represents clients at the Capitol. You can sign up on his website to receive the Capitol Updates newsletter by email.
Senate Bill 303 by Sen. Wayne Shaw (R-Grove) and Rep. Lee Denney (R-Cushing) is a bill that requires the State Department of Education, in collaboration with the Department of Human Services and others to develop and make available to school districts age-appropriate sexual abuse and assault awareness and prevention education for grades kindergarten through twelve.
The bill also provides that beginning with the 2016-2017 school year, the board of each school district shall adopt a policy to provide age-appropriate sexual abuse and assault awareness and prevention education for grades kindergarten through twelve. The bill has an opt-out provision for parents who do not want their children to receive the information.
Last Tuesday the Senate, after lively debate, in a floor vote of 19-25 defeated SB 303. Sen. Shaw successfully moved to have the vote reconsidered, which means it could come up for a vote in the Senate again at any time. Sen. Shaw said the state’s Children’s Advocacy Centers served 9,500 abused children. 70 % of those were victims of sexual abuse and 45 % of those were six-years-old or younger. If my arithmetic is correct that’s nearly 3,000 Oklahoma children younger than 6 who were victims of sexual abuse in one year.
Last Monday on the other side of the rotunda the House passed a similar, if more narrow measure, HB 1684 by Rep. Denney and Sen. AJ Griffin (R-Guthrie) by a vote of 57-37 (only 6 votes more than needed.) HB 1684 cites statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study report that the median age of child abuse victims is 9. Additionally, 25 percent of women and 16 percent of men are sexually abused as children; approximately 90% know their abuser; only 38% ever disclose the abuse and only 29% of parents ever talk to their children about sexual abuse and rarely with children less than 9. HB 1684 requires age-appropriate sexual abuse awareness and prevention education in grades pre-kindergarten through fifth grade.
Both the defeat in the Senate and passage in the House on this issue were by close margins. To me this means that advocacy could make a difference. It seems like a better policy to give children a chance to protect themselves from sexual abuse rather than to try to heal broken lives after the fact.
